Democrats will now have a solid majority in the Senate come January 3rd, with at least 4 more votes than it will take to strip the filibuster out of that body’s archaic rules. We flipped Texas, Kansas, South Carolina, Iowa, Ohio, Maine, and North Carolina on a single night, Mississippi on Wednesday and Alaska is in the wings.
That's the sort of repudiation a sitting president gets that only comes along once in a lifetime.
And yet when Chuck Schumer was asked — twice — if he’d finally get rid of the filibuster, he refused to answer. Hakeem Jefferies has been ambiguous, noting that it’s not his legislative body.
When John Thune refused to blow up the filibuster to pass the Republicans’ ultra-voter-suppression SAVE America Act, Trump went nuts, posting on his Nazi-infested social media site that whichever party terminates the filibuster first “will be the Party that survives and thrives.”
For once in his life, he’s being both truthful and right. And now Democrats will have that chance.
Senator Chris Van Hollen said this past weekend that Democrats should be willing to push through legislation even if it hits Trump’s veto and, therefore, the filibuster has to go. James Talarico correctly called it a “Jim Crow relic” the night he beat Ken Paxton. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have been saying it for years, perhaps decades, and even President Obama called for its end as he stood over John Lewis’ casket.
You won’t find the filibuster in the Constitution; while the rule enabling it was put into place during Jefferson’s presidency in 1806, it wasn’t really used until 1837 when the great theorist of slavery, John C. Calhoun, used it to block a bill promoting the end of that cruel institution.
The House of Representatives had a mini-filibuster version of this that they nuked in 1890 when Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed pushed through what became Reed’s Rules, establishing an actual majority-rules democracy in that body. Since then, the republic has survived just fine.
But it was the filibuster in the Senate that let Jim Crow rule the South for at least 70 years; in the year the House ended their supermajority rule in 1890, they passed a voting rights law that would have ended Jim Crow; it was filibustered in the Senate. The filibuster has always been about keeping Black people down, first and foremost.
Harry Reid’s deputy chief of staff, Adam Jentleson, wrote a book (Kill Switch) about its history from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 all the way through 1964, and found, as he wrote:
“[T]he only bills stopped by filibusters were civil rights bills.”
It was also used against anti-lynching bills in 1922, 1935, and 1938, against the fair employment bill of 1946 that would have protected Black workers, and the Civil Rights Act of 1957 (Strom Thurmond led that filibuster).
Mitch McConnell then turned the filibuster into a permanent standing rule, requiring fully 60 votes for every piece of legislation the Senate considered while he was Majority Leader. He told a group of morbidly rich donors in 2019 to “think of me as the Grim Reaper” for anything progressive that came out of the House.
None of this came from this nation’s Founders or the Framers of the Constitution. Quite the opposite, in fact: Hamilton wrote in Federalist 22 that requiring more than a majority would “subject the sense of the greater number to that of the lesser,” and Madison warned in Federalist 58 that under such a rule “the power would be transferred to the minority.”
And the topic was extensively debated in Philadelphia the summer the Constitution was written in 1787: they wrote five supermajority requirements into that document for treaties, impeachment convictions, veto overrides, expulsions, and constitutional amendments. That’s it.
And when Republicans used it against Democratic legislation to establish voting rights and gut Citizens United, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema joined all 50 Republicans to let them proceed, 52 to 48. The Republican side of the chamber broke into applause. Similarly, in March 2021, a $15 minimum wage died 42 to 58 because a Republican filibuster blocked it.
Still, Schumer refused to change the Senate rules — which only takes 51 votes — and still won’t discuss it going forward.
Meanwhile, almost every time the filibuster gets in Republicans’ way they simply kill it. McConnell nuked it for Supreme Court nominees in 2017 so Neil Gorsuch could take Merrick Garland’s stolen seat. John Thune nuked it again last September so Trump’s toxic sub-cabinet nominees could be confirmed in batches of fifty at a time on a party-line vote.
Pennsylvania and AIPAC Senator John Fetterman wrote last July that he’d been “horribly wrong” to campaign against the filibuster in 2022, because, he said, just look at all the terrible things Republicans would have passed over the past two years without it.
I say, let them.
The filibuster didn’t stop the One Big Beautiful Bill and its Medicaid cuts, because Republicans passed that by a simple majority through a legislative trick called reconciliation. It didn’t stop Trump’s insane tariffs, Miller’s ICE raids, the National Guard deployments, the naked and racist assault on our civil service, or illegal and unconstitutional war in Iran: Trump did all of those things by executive fiat.
And voters saw and next year will see in spades the damage from that One Big Billionaire’s bill that couldn’t be filibustered; it tells us what will happen if the filibuster is eliminated and Republicans succeed in getting toxic laws passed.
The American people will be horrified and the backlash will be overwhelming, just as it has been to the list above.
When a party wins, it should govern and let the people judge the results. Americans know the difference between Democrats raising the minimum wage and Republicans shoveling another trillion dollars to billionaires; they know the difference between Democrats protecting the right to vote and Republicans punishing queer kids for merely existing.
I get it that Trump still holds the veto, but that works on the same principle. If Democrats kill the filibuster and actually pass bold legislation that will make Americans’ lives better and he vetoes them, the backlash effect will be the same and help democracy’s chances in 2028.
The Congress dissolves in January and the Senate must reboot itself, re-ratifying its own rules. That’s the moment to strip John C. Calhoun’s filibuster out of it. Even discounting Fetterman as this generation’s Manchin and Sinema turncoats, Democrats will have enough votes to get major bold legislation done and dare Trump to veto them.
If Schumer and Jeffries need a little help finding the nerve, maybe somebody in the Army can smuggle some of “Pretty Pete” Hegseth’s testosterone out and give them a poke in the arm. I’d happily cover the cost of the prescription, if that’s what it takes. /s
A party that wins by a landslide shouldn’t have to spend the next two years giving excuses for how Aaron Burr and John C. Calhoun’s ancient anti-abolition rule prevents them from making the bold change Americans are literally begging for.